From Rhetoric to Reality Promising Practices for Advancing Transportation Equity in Canadian Communities

By Tessa Williams & Meghan Winters, Simon Fraser University on behalf of INTERACT and LevelUp Planning

The way our profession plans, designs, and delivers transportation systems is changing. There is growing awareness that historical city building practices— from displacement, disinvestment, and exclusionary design—created inequitable transportation systems. Nearly 1 million Canadians live in transportation poverty, meaning their ability to access opportunities is limited by inadequate, unaffordable, or unsafe travel options.1 These transportation difficulties compound other social and economic disadvantages that disproportionately affect racialized people, Indigenous people, low-income people, and people with disabilities. Although traditional approaches to design and decision-making resulted in injustice, transportation professionals also have the power to create more equitable transportation systems that better meet the needs of the communities they serve.

Through our team’s extensive work with cities—as practitioners and researchers—we’ve heard that the big question is no longer whether to take action towards equity, but how. To tackle this question, we are developing case studies of cities who have took notable steps in their journey towards transportation equity. This project is a partnership between, INTERACT, a pan-Canadian research collaborative, and LevelUp Planning, a multidisciplinary consulting team specializing in equity and community wellbeing. The goal of our project is to capture and share promising practices to meaningfully embed equity in sustainable transportation practice.

1 J. Allen, S. Farber, Sizing up transport poverty: A national scale accounting of low-income households suffering from inaccessibility in Canada, and what to do about it, Transport Policy. 74 (2019) 214–223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2018.11.018.

Equity in Policy & Practice

We started this work by looking for places with city-wide equity policies. From an initial set of policies from 22 Canadian communities, we selected a shortlist of eight cities (Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal, New Westminster, Ottawa, Saskatoon, Vancouver, and Victoria) based on regional representation, population size, and each city’s reputation for taking action on equity. We found that equity policies in these cities focused on framing the city’s responsibility and approach to solutions at a high level, but there was little guidance on how to apply equity principles to specific city portfolios, such as transportation.

For the shortlist cities, we also completed a rapid review of recent transportation plans, and three cities stood out for the tangible steps they took to take action on equity in transportation: Edmonton, New Westminster, and Ottawa. We spoke to 15+ transportation and equity practitioners in these cities, including consultants, data analysts, engineers, and planners. We asked them to tell us about how their teams and cities are working to advance transportation equity. Below we highlight three examples, and in our forthcoming report we will share more approaches of how to embed equity in transportation. We offer these examples not as an instruction manual for “doing” equity work, but rather to offer inspiration for how practitioners can make changes in their own practice.

About the partners

LevelUp Planning is a multidisciplinary, women-owned consulting collaborative. LevelUp has worked with several municipalities in Canada to integrate equity into their day-to-day planning work, through the development of overarching equity frameworks, the use of equity-specific data, and through equity-focused community engagement processes.

The Interventions, Research, and Action in Cities Team (INTERACT) is a pan-Canadian collaboration of scientists, urban planners, public health practitioners, community partners, and residents studying the design of cities. Since 2017, INTERACT has led a research program to address the urgent need for better evidence, generated by and for communities, that can guide local action towards healthier and more equitable cities in Canada.

Practices and Inspiration for Sustainable Transportation Equity (The PISTE Project) is a collaboration between INTERACT and LevelUp to craft case studies of Canadian cities embedding equity into sustainable transportation practice. Check out the project website for updates on the final report, targeted for Fall 2023.

Safe Mobility Strategy: Edmonton, Alberta

In many cities the locations for road safety improvements are often prioritized based on resident requests. In the Safe Mobility Strategy, the City of Edmonton mapped the location of crashes and injuries in the transportation network, then overlaid the map with neighbourhood demographic data. Through this exercise they found that certain communities were disproportionately exposed to crash and serious injury, including areas with people with lower incomes, Indigenous people, and people that speak languages other than English. They also mapped the location of road safety inquiries (e.g., calls to 311) and found little overlap between the neighbourhoods with high numbers of crashes and injuries and the those with highest inquiry volumes. This mismatch helped staff realize that those most in need might experience barriers to contacting the city, and they need to transition to more proactive road safety investigations that are based on needs, rather than just complaints.

“Based on crash and equity analyses, we know that some parts of our community need extra focus and attention over the next five years. The transportation system is one of the many mechanisms through which society marginalizes certain communities... Removing transportationrelated barriers will require confronting uncomfortable topics, learning about experiences others have had that may not align with our own, and acting as allies to those that are disproportionately affected by the way the current system is planned, designed, activated, and maintained.” Safe Mobility Strategy, Edmonton (page 37)2

Temporary Greenway: New Westminster, British Columbia

Quick build transportation infrastructure can create opportunities for people to experience different street layouts and provide feedback to inform the development of the permanent design. New Westminster staff worked with consultants to create a temporary greenway as a demonstration project and engage with the community. In the process they made what seemed like minor changes to the local bus route, but quickly learned this change had a disproportionate impact on the older adults and people with mobility issues that lived nearby. The project team realized that, although this group is small in size, the negative impact on their lives was large. The team quickly responded to the feedback, evaluating several route options before landing on a solution that worked better for everyone. What we heard from the project team was that this process helped them understand the limits of their own experience and perceptions as able-bodied transportation practitioners, and inspired them to apply these learnings to future projects. We also heard that the support from the city’s leadership to experiment was critical, resulting in a project with a positive learning experience, rather than one that ended in failure.

“Clients need to have some vulnerability and humility and be willing to learn, again New West is great for that. Absolutely there are things we learned from [the greenway project] and we’d do differently now, but they still did it, and they’re committed to doing it again. There are other clients who probably would have gotten scared from that approach and not want to do it ever again.” Consultant, New Westminster